A Head Like on Easter Island

Hey kids! It’s time for Scifi Theatre with Uncle Tom and Uncle Dan!

You might remember our previous  fun with Aztecs and Aliens.Now get ready for a rip-roaring time with A Head Like on Easter Island.

TOM:

I was thinking about how to reconcile the multiple iterations or potential interpretations of these mythical ancient supercivs, for example, and hit on the idea that perhaps the unifying element could be technology allowing travel or communication between parallel worldlines. Perhaps some of these ancient supercivs aren’t even so much geographic locations as existential axioms that emerge independently in different timelines through a certain probabilistic “critical mass” or information density–so Atlantis is an island continent in one timeline, a world-spanning maritime empire in another. And any given one of these supercivs would have a set of varying relationships to the other supercivs, even the alternate variations of their own; so Atlantis 1.6 might be at war with Atlantis 4.8, in negotiations with Lemuria 6.0, have a joint trade agreement with Atlantis 4.1 and Mu 16, etc.

One of the ideas I’ve played with is that the Easter Island heads might be true representational portraits based on observation of posthuman time travelers. It would make for an interesting recursive causal relationship if the moai-like posthuman form was itself an aesthetic nod to Easter Island!

Now I’m musing on a scenario where the goal is to seed these memes across as many timelines as possible, leading to some sort of singularity or “critical mass” of information density where their incidence or emergence becomes inevitable, perhaps across ALL times and places. Seeding archetypes, or even godhood.

Chrestovenator’s () thoughts on the potential “memetic seeding” aspect of the Moaid “civilization” made a big impact on me, and dovetailed closely with other ideas I’d been exploring regarding information density as it relates to parallel universes and more esoteric philosophical and fringe science concepts like morphic resonance and the noosphere. Please see our exchange in the comments here.

DAN:

Of course you can’t tell a story about Easter Island without addressing its environmental and societal collapse and the horror and cannibalism than ensued. One way to marry both those concepts is to ask this question: what if the Rapa Nui people weren’t regular Polynesians, but colonists from an alternate world? Perhaps a world something like this? 

 On our earth, however, all they find is a bunch of scattered desert islands where a continent should be, and only have time to send out a single party of researchers before a trans-world war destroys their equipment and closes the trans-time gate. The Easter Islanders, then, are the citizens of a lost colony.

The Moai might be an attempt to contact the home timeline, perhaps a reference to an artistic style or motif  –or a robot or cartoon character– that only another person from Home would recognize. The cry for help doesn’t work. The Rapa Nui, in their hopelessness, topple the Moai. By the time Captain Cook shows up, the heights of Atlantean civilization are a shadow of a legend, and remain so until the 1990′s, when Europeans re-erect some Moai and finally manage to attract the Atlanteans’ attention.

And here’s where my story draws its sustenance from Tom’s ideas of “ existential axioms that emerge independently.” Atlantis is a timeline-travelling culture that promotes different versions of itself (shades of the Real America in McAuley’s Cowboy Angels). It turns out this timeline is an aberration in which the Polynesian people failed to take over the world.

What? It was those dirty, drunken, fundamentalist Europeans who conquered everyone? Damn it. We need to correct that timeline right now!